The Lived International

Demonstrating that a life of praxis--living international relations--yields more insight than a life of theory alone, Steven Chan provides an antidote to a purely conceptual approach to International Relations. It is also the work of a poet with a distinguished literary reputation, recounting travel and poetry, engagement and responsibility.

If you are a student heading to Canada to live and study you will find this guide very useful. It is the first book you should read to know Canadian culture and customs, whether you stay for a short time or for several years. In it you will find information about Canadian families, homes, food and eating habits. You will also learn everything you need to know about how to dress for the changing climate, communication and transportation. Reading it before or after you arrive, will help you prepare for your study abroad experience and explain new routines to make you more comfortable. Enjoy your opportunity and best of luck in your studies in Canada!

The Lived International is a poetic account of Stephen Chan’s personal engagement in International Relations. It speaks to the inadequacy of an abstract voyeurism while the problems of the world are death, devastation and underdevelopment. Drawn from a lifetime of travel and engagement, and from both published and hitherto unpublished poetry, forming a parallel list to the author’s academic works, the book seeks to inject into debate the sense that language, spoken and written discourse alone, are not a sufficient claim to ‘bearing witness’, and that even activism from afar can often fail to understand a human condition that afflicts the majority of the world’s population. Chan demonstrates that a life of praxis, living international relations, yields more insights than a life of theory alone.

International student migration makes a significant contribution to higher education in the United Kingdom, with Southern Africa, and Nigeria in particular, positioned joint sixth in the top ten of sending countries. Many of these student-migrants, in supplementing their finances to fund their studies in the United Kingdom, undertake employment. Temporary and/or part-time employment is integral to the student-migrant experience, despite the express purpose of their admission into the United Kingdom designated for study purposes and not work. This explicit object is reflected in restrictions affixed to international students’ employment rights whilst studying; they are generally restricted to a maximum of 20 hours of work per week during term time and proscribed from working full time or as independent contractors. Given the scant regard this topic has received in the existing literature, this study offers an examination of students’ lived employment experiences under these rules. The study aims to offer a contribution, first in respect of the employment experiences of student-migrants through the analytical framework of ‘precarity’ by examining the various manifestations of insecurity in the students’ lived realities, nuanced by structures of migration control and labour market temporalities. Secondly, by adopting the socio-legal schema of legal consciousness, the study considers the student-migrants’ relationship with the law by way of the legal restrictions on their employment and examines their agency as evidenced through efforts to derogate from these rules.

This book marks a departure from traditional assumptions concerning the deficiencies of Chinese international students in terms of learning and adapting. It employs phenomenological narrative inquiry and a small culture approach to investigate the evolved, fluid experience of pursuing a graduate degree in the U.S. at Blue Fountain University (a pseudonym for a mid-western university). Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this book addresses two fundamental questions: What study abroad is and what study abroad counts? The sociocultural dimensions that shape the cross-border degree seeking endeavors inform stakeholders what works for Chinese international students’ successful pursuits as EFL learners and ESL users and what could be improved. This book shares thoughts on the implications and impact of educational contexts to stakeholders at normal and dynamic contexts interrupted by global pandemic outbreak. It contributes to the understanding of the internationalization of the host institute and the EFL education reform efforts (policy making, teacher education, and classroom practice) in China (and in Asia at large).

This book explores the emerging and under-researched phenomenon of internationalised schooling in China. It focuses on a group of “accidental” teachers who fell into teaching through happenstance or necessity, a group of teachers increasingly seeking refuge in Chinese Internationalised Schools. Chinese Internationalised Schools cater to an affluent middle class in China, offering some form of international curriculum which is taught by host country Chinese nationals and expatriate teachers. Chapters focus on three dimensions of teachers’ lived experiences of working in these schools: the intercultural, which explores teachers’ negotiations of intercultural teacher identities; the precarious, which highlights the struggles they might face at work; and the resilient, which illustrates how teachers survive—and even thrive—in the position. The author identifies a complex interplay between surviving and thriving, giving rise to the concept of “sur-thrival.”

When thousands of young people checked out of Western society and sought enlightenment in the East, Floyd and Sally McClung set aside the comforts of American suburbia and answered God's call to reach out to them with the gospel. In Kabul, Afghanistan, a key stop on the hippy trail, and later in Amsterdam, Holland, the West's own window to that trail, the McClungs committed themselves to meeting the penniless, the drugged, the sick, and the disillusioned right where they were. Whether among hippy seekers or the addicts and prostitutes of Amsterdam's infamous Red Light District, the McClungs lived out a message of hope. Hippie trail from Afghanistan to Amsterdam, during the 60's. An ordinary young couple dared to set aside the comforts of American suburbia and committed themselves to stepping out in faith with the message of hope.